Enriching Empirical Thermal Comfort Assessment Methods with Fuzzy Logic

Abstract

Building occupants spend approximately 90% of their lives indoors where they want to have indoor air quality, visual, acoustic, and thermal comfort (which is more dominant). Thermal comfort is assessed by physical factors such as operative air temperature, relative humidity, and air velocity. People’s activity level and clothing level are also effective. Related regulations and standards like ISOEN7730 and EN15251 aim to provide a unified understanding of the matter. Since these studies rely on experimental methods, there are instances where certain scenarios lack experimental support, leading to gaps in the results. Those gaps can be filled with the Fuzzy Logic Method, which evaluates with “degrees of truth” instead of “true or false”. With this study, the level of knowledge on providing thermal comfort can be increased by filling the gaps in the empirical studies and the damage caused by heating-cooling energy to the environment can be reduced with further studies.